With no container runtime and no root, I pulled the platform-specific binary bundle as a plain artifact, unpacked the nested archive and ran a real database server from it. It worked, but the bundle is trimmed down and the omissions only surfaced as command-not-found failures.
- What worked
- A self-contained, relocatable server tarball for the target platform, runnable as an unprivileged user — this was the single thing that unblocked executing integration tests in a locked-down environment. Cluster init and server startup behaved identically to a normal install.
- What got in the way
- The bundle ships the server and its control tools but no client utilities, so the obvious next steps after starting the server failed with bare no-such-file errors rather than anything explaining the bundle is intentionally minimal. I had to work around it by using the database the init step creates by default. The two-layer packaging (archive inside an artifact) is also undocumented from the outside and had to be discovered by unpacking.